On Gentoo Releases and stuff

When I got more involved with Gentoo, the release team was aiming to release the then-pending release (2007.1) in early December. Eventually, that date slipped time and again. It was decided to drop the entire release and do a new one (2008.0). Again, the dates kept slipping. Now, the question is why a release is slipping time and again.

* It's not quite as simple as it may seem. Building release media in itself isn't easy to begin with - catalyst is a powerful but complex (and complicated) tool. I got kind of dropped into cold water with release building for alpha (probably because I was the one who didn't have a chair when the music stopped). catalyst build errors can be notoriously hard to debug. On top of this, the central release coordinator has to keep in mind all of the gritty details of the arches that will see release media. There's arches like ppc which also have a differently-bitted cousin (ppc64); there are arches that are very, very slow when building stuff (MIPS). On top of that, some software just doesn't build on some arches (no Java on alpha, for example) which can make deciding what to put on the LiveCD very hairy. This also stresses one point: without the help and expertise of the arch teams, building a release is completely impossible. Some arches are more motivated to get a release out, some less so. Some are notoriously understaffed when it comes to release building, some have too few machines to test the releases (or no physical access, which is just as bad).

* People have lives. This is one that bit us this time: life struck at a very bad point (not that the event had been any better post-release). This occupied the time of a dev for a prolonged time. It made painfully obvious that in some spots, stand-in personnel wasn't there. Let me stress this lest I get misunderstood: such things happen and that the dev in question saw tending to the event as more important than get a release done is his prerogative and not to be questioned. That there wasn't a stand in to keep stuff going (even at a slower pace) is something that needs to be fixed.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

Latest News

Games for GNU/Linux

Feral Interactive was proud to inform the media about the upcoming Christmas release of the immense DLC pack for the Total War: WARHAMMER turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game to SteamOS and Linux.
Last month, on November 22, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive brought us the Linux/SteamOS port of the astonishing and addictive Total War: WARHAMMER game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. And now, they promise to port the Total War: WARHAMMER Realm of The Wood Elves DLC too.

Containers News

Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.
The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it's tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

AMDGPU News

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD.
This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.